{film} – Page 268 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 93

One of a series of tremendous designs by Malika Favre for a new Penguin edition of the Kama Sutra.

• New interviews: “…Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel Confessions of a Mask.” Nicholas Currie, better known via his Momus mask. | “The horror in music comes from the silence,” says John Carpenter. | “It’s dangerous to be an artist. That’s what we talk about in Naked Lunch — and it’s dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack.” David Cronenberg at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• New books: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a Joycean memoir by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot. | A stack of new works from Strange Attractor including a collection of Savage Pencil‘s Trip or Squeek comic strips. | Robert Irwin’s Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. A shame about the high price on the latter but I’m sure it looks wonderful.

• The Blu-ray release of Wings (1927), William A. Wellman’s silent drama about air aces during the First World War, has prompted renewed attention for the passionate relationship between its two male leads, especially this deathbed scene which is tagged as the first same-sex kiss in cinema. That’s arguable, of course, but it’s certainly a touching moment.

• From 2009: Searching the Library of Babel, a list of all the stories in all 33 volumes of The Library of Babel, a 1979 Spanish language anthology of fantastic literature edited by Jorge Luis Borges.

• Lots of newpaper attention in the past week for the not-so-fresh news that magic mushrooms could help fight depression. Nature went into the detail of the latest studies.

• French group Air have written the score for a rare colour print of Le voyage dans la lune (1902) by Georges Méliès. Air’s YouTube channel has extracts.

• From 1989: The Merchant of Shadows by Angela Carter.

• Will Hunt on the Ghost River of Manhattan.

• Selected Letters of William S. Burroughs

• Sexy Boy (1998) by Air | Surfing On A Rocket (2003) by Air | Mer Du Japon (2007) by Air.

Yosemite in HD

Having written about views of Yosemite National Park only a couple of weeks ago, linking to this gorgeous video seemed obligatory. Yosemite HD is a short film by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty which captures the park in a series of stunning timelapse views during day and night. No CGI, just the natural world via Canon and Zeiss lenses. M83‘s Outro makes a suitably bombastic soundtrack. I could watch a lot more of this.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite
• Carleton Watkins in Yosemite

Weekend links 92

Untitled etching by Briony Morrow-Cribbs.

• An interview with author Paul Russell whose new novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, concerns the gay brother of the celebrated Vladimir.

• Joseph Cornell turns up again in a report at Strange Flowers about Locus Solus, an exhibition in Madrid devoted to the work of Raymond Roussel.

• Night of Pan: 42 seconds of occult freakery by Bill Butler featuring Vincent Gallo, Twiggy Ramirez plus (blink and you miss him) Kenneth Anger.

• Jan Švankmajer talks (briefly) about his new film Surviving Life. A subtitled trailer is here; the very different Japanese trailer is here.

• Cormac McCarthy turns in his first original screenplay. I’d rather he turned in a new novel but any new Cormac is better than none at all.

• Barnbrook show off another design for the latest CD from John Foxx & The Maths.

• Melanie McDonagh asks “Where have all the book illustrators gone?”

• Congrats to Evan for getting his poetry in the New York Times.

• Margaret Atwood on writing The Handmaid’s Tale.

• Subliminal Frequencies: An Interview With Pinch.

• The (Lucas) Cranach Digital Archive

• The M.O.P. Radionic Workshop

• Music promos of the week from the Weird Seventies: All The Years Round (1972) by Amon Düül II, and Supernature (1977) by Cerrone.

Ballet Mécanique

A film to round off a week of connected posts. Ballet Mécanique (1924) is more Dada than Surrealist if you want to get strict about the taxonomy, but the latter movement grew out of the former, and this short experiment by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy is a pioneering piece of work however it’s labelled. The film was photographed by Man Ray who used a variety of techniques including animation and kaleidoscope shots to present a “ballet” of machine parts and kitchen utensils. Some of the kaleidoscope images are so close to the opening shots of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) you have to wonder whether a viewing of this gave Lang ideas.

Ballet Mécanique has been provided with many scores over the years, from player pianos and sirens to more traditional arrangements. The copy at the Internet Archive has a contemporary score but like all silent films this can always be replaced with music of your own choosing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Metropolis!
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Joseph Cornell, 1967

More Surrealism (sort of) from 1967. Joseph Cornell is a catalogue for an exhibition selected and presented by Diane Waldman at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1967. The book is one of a number of new and very welcome additions from the Guggenheim Museum to the stock of scanned books at the Internet Archive. Old art books and catalogues often feature black-and-white reproductions but that drawback doesn’t invalidate the usefulness of their textual content. The Museum’s own pages for the archived books may be browsed here.

Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet (1949–1953).

For more on the Magus of Utopia Parkway I’d suggest the BBC’s documentary film Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box (1991) but only if you can find a copy since I’ve not seen it online anywhere. That’s a shame because it’s an excellent introduction to Cornell’s life and work, with the added bonus of commentary from Susan Sontag and Cornell’s film collaborators Stan Brakhage and Rudolph Burckhardt. There’s also a surprise appearance from Tony Curtis who was friends with the artist and who reads from his diaries.

Medici Slot Machine (1942).

Elsewhere, Ubuweb has Cornell’s short films which proceed from the radical re-editing of Rose Hobart (1936) to more lyrical works such as Nymphlight (1957). And I’ve mentioned this before but it’s always worth another look: Americana Fantastica, the edition of Charles Henry Ford’s View magazine edited and illustrated by Cornell in 1943.

Medici Princess (1952).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell
• View: The Modern Magazine